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What Dreams May Come

SITE UPDATE: Over this week you may have noticed some weird stuff going on with the site. The databases were apparently corrupted by a combination of random events and my own ineptitude. I’ve got stuff mostly working again though there are a few random issues. I’m trying to get the buy a print button working properly while I’m at it. Sorry for the issues and the missing strip, I’ll try to make it up to you somehow.

RANDOM UPDATE: Oh yeah today is my birthday. Wooo!

People are curious. Many of us are always on the look out for some new fascinating fact about ourselves, as if simple self reflection weren’t enough. Our conscious minds aren’t good enough for this sort of thing so where do we look? Those wild ridiculous things called dreams hold all the answers. But what do these random things made up of seemingly disparate elements tell us? If you’re like Lil K (and I suspect you are, you maniac!) they don’t say anything good.

Oh hey look, it’s Morpheus. He’s finally got around to being in a comic. Cool!

There’s been some interest in dream interpretation for quite a long time; longer than you might imagine, even. It’s been something like forever. Dreams are strange things, deeply personal yet entirely alien. They reflect our daily lives and yet are unlike anything we know in waking life. While cognitive sciences have made strides toward helping us understand what consciousness is, it hasn’t yet adequately worked out what dreams are or what they are for. We know they’re necessary to humans and likely most other animals, but the exact nature and purpose of them eludes us. It seems pretty astounding that something everybody does has yet to be properly worked out. It’s really an incredible thing to study, it seems. If I were diligent enough for a career in science, it’s something I’d love to look into.

Dreams were absolutely fascinating to the Greeks and Egyptians and writings still exist today about the ways in which dreams were experienced and interpreted. It seems as if there have been dream movements over the years and across cultures. Different cultures and periods experience different types of dreams. Egyptians (at least what we have recorded) reportedly experienced a great many dreams involving their gods, as did the Greeks (who inherited a lot of ideas about dreams from the Egyptians) while later European cultures in the Middle Ages viewed dreams as evil visitations from the Devil. Human beings, being social animals with minds largely made up by the cultures in which they live, seem to give way pretty easily to pressure, even when it comes to their dreams.

It’s all a bit difficult to study dreams, as not everyone can remember all or even most of them. What we experience as large chunks of time passing in our dreams can actually be the firing of synapses in the space of just a few moments. It’s kind of amazing to think about.

As for good ol’ Morpheus, the fellow seems to have been a rather minor deity in the scheme of things, at least when it comes to the grand tales of Greek Myth. Not many stories refer to him and when they do he isn’t a stand out character. Even Ovid’s Metamorpheses doesn’t have much to say about him, though that’s technically Roman literature.

Types of dreams come and go and our understanding of what they are and what they’re for marches ever onward. As for me, I rarely remember my dreams, if I have them at all. I like to think that I get my dreams out on paper in this comic and on sketchpads. When I do remember my dreams, they are almost always terrible nightmares. The funny thing about nightmares is that they make waking life seem even more pleasant. Not a bad trade-off.

Until we work out exactly what dreams are all about, I suspect people will continue to search dream interpretation books and therapists about the stories their minds tell themselves at night. Whether it’s a valid process or not is still up in the air, but I suppose it can’t hurt to try to figure it out.

If you’re a fan of Morpheus, or of Neil Gaiman (who just might be the greatest author to ever exist ever), you should check out The Sandman, published under DC Comics. It stopped running in the 90’s, but they’re selling leather-bound volumes of the collection with 50-100 issues each, for about $100 each. If you did some digging, though, I’m sure you could find a couple issues online for free.

Judging by the awesome content of your own comics, I think it’s something you’d really like.

Good to see that the site is back up, also happy birthday!
I really like to study dreams myself. Not scientifically, but more creatively. I have made some dream art (which you could see here http://www.mnartists.org/Evan_Gragg ) but I also plan to draw some comics about them when I get the chance.
I just love that you find a dream really interesting and you share it with a coworker or friend and they look at you like you had control over your dreams. I’m sorry, but getting kidnapped by a dildo enthusiast and then escaping and stealing his dog is not really my ideal dream…

I’ve been wondering lately why I was running through a skyscraper that was completely filled with penguin habitats (and penguins). And why the ticket that got me in didn’t also get me in to the oceanic museum across the city…

I have epic dreams. Have you ever gone giant spider hunting with a small platoon of random people in a huge church with a glass roof that contains an exotic bazaar? How about remote controlled wolves you use to distract the guards as you help your client, who moments before, you were helping to plan his sporty wedding? He turned out to be an awesome spy/rock star with ninja skills. There is more…

The Mesopotamians were the masters of dream interpretation. They wrote huge, long lists attempting to catalogue comprehensively everything that could happen in a dream and what it meant about the future. They saw events in dreams as mirroring events in the waking world, both being written by the gods, so that it was like the gods wrote in one language in your dreams and in another language in waking life, and you could translate one to the other. It’s often argued that Greek philosophy has its origins in the rudimentary logic shown by Mesopotamian list texts: it’s kind of a misguided effort, but they’re try to sort the universe into coherent categories, match causes up with their effects, and identify underlying phenomena in daily occurences. Which is a lot like science.